Tuesday, February 6, 2018

A Fond Farewell!

camosunbog.org has been active for 18 years with relatively few changes. A remarkable length of time for a website

When
the website was set up in 1999 the computing world was very different. Many
people still used dial up (including myself) and this meant files had to be
small to ensure reasonable loading times. Web pages were written using the
newly developed WYS-WYG HTML editors (in our case Claris Home Page). It had
also become possible to have two different pages on separate parts of the
screen using FRAMES and the website took full advantage of this.

The
website was written by Bill Maylone, a professional artist and animator. Bill
did a lot of work for the NFB and probably his best known film is
"64000000 years ago" which introduced dinosaurs to generations of
Canadian school children.

Bill was
a perfectionist and spent hundreds of hours on the programme. There was an
editorial committee made up of Brian Woodcock, Nicole Robinson,Tom Nichols, the late Sig Techy and myself. However nearly all the work was done by Bill.

The
text was very well written and encouraged readers to continue reading.
The website was filled with lots of neat touches. Chapter headings were
printed by hand and were often supplemented by whimsical sketches. Some
are illustrated below. He had a lot of trouble getting the right background
colour for the site and finally had to use two separate pixels to get it right.

The
site proved very popular. In 2011, it
averaged 245 visits per month with 160 different visitors. This would mean
something like 50,000 visits over 17 years – a remarkable number

The
website was originally hosted by Nature Vancouver. However in 2010 we started
using our own domain. This worked well for a number of years. However in the
last few years it became impossible to make changes to the site. Also, it did
not work that well with mobile devices. The decision was made to develop a new
site and we appreciate that PSPS agreed to support us in this.

The
new site was developed by Issaku Inami, Josh Braidek and Emma Harrower. They
have put in a lot of time and produced an excellent and up-to-date site. The
text is quite similar to the original but with some important additions
including Musqueam history and a section on fungi